Towards a Collaborative Filtering Framework for Recommendation in Museums: From Preference Elicitation to Group's Visits

AbstractRecommendation systems based on collaborative filtering methods can be exploited in the context of providing personalized artworks tours within a museum. However, in order to be effectively used, several problems have to be addressed: user preferences are not expressed as rating, items to be suggested are located in a physical space, and users may be in a group. In this work, we present a general framework that, by using the Matrix Factorization (MF) approach and a graph representation of a museum, addresses the problem of generating and then recommending an artworks sequence for a group of visitors within a museum. To reach a high-quality initial personalization, the recommendation system uses a simple, but efficient, elicitation method that is inspired by the MF approach. Moreover, the proposed approach considers the individual or the aggregated artworks' ratings to build up a solution that takes into account the physical location of the artworks

Capturing the Visitor Profile for a Personalized Mobile Museum Experience: an Indirect Approach

An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient, ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we investigate the use of indirect profiling methods through a visitor quiz, in order to provide the visitor with specific museum content. Building on our experience of a first study aimed at the design, implementation and user testing of a short quiz version at the Acropolis Museum, a second parallel study was devised. This paper introduces this research, which collected and analyzed data from two environments: the Acropolis Museum and social media (i.e. Facebook). Key profiling issues are identified, results are presented, and guidelines towards a generalized approach for the profiling needs of cultural institutions are discussed

Consumer Acceptance of Recommendations by Interactive Decision Aids: The Joint Role of Temporal Distance and Concrete vs. Abstract Communications

Interactive decision aids (IDAs) typically use concrete product feature-based approaches to interact with consumers. Recently however, interaction designs that focus on communicating abstract consumer needs have been suggested as a promising alternative. This article investigates how temporal distance moderates the effectiveness of these two competing IDA communication designs by its effect on consumers’ mental representation of the product decision problem. Temporal distance is inherently connected to IDAs in two ways. Congruency between consumption timing (immediate vs. distant) and IDA communication design (concrete vs. abstract, respectively) increases the likelihood to accept the IDA’s advice. This effect is also achieved by congruency between IDA process timing (immediate vs. delayed delivery of recommendations) and IDA communication design (concrete vs. abstract, respectively). We further show that this process is mediated by the perceived transparency of the IDA process. Managers and researchers need to take into account the importance of congruency between the user and the interface through which companies interact with their users and can further optimize IDAs so that they better match consumers’ mental representations

Retrospective protocols in usability testing: a comparison of Post-session RTA versus Post-task RTA reports

We present the results of a study that compared two placements of the Retrospective Think-aloud (RTA): A Post-session RTA where the think-aloud occurs after all tasks are complete, and a Post-task RTA where the think-aloud is elicited after each task. Data from task performance and verbal measures were collected from 24 participants. The results suggest that in terms of task performance, participants in the Post-session RTA condition performed tasks faster, with fewer errors and fewer clicks than in the Post-task RTA condition. In terms of utterances, participants in the Post-task RTA condition produced significantly more utterances that explained actions, expectations and procedural descriptions than in the Post-session RTA condition

Operationalizing the circular city model for naples' city-port: A hybrid development strategy

The city-port context involves a decisive reality for the economic development of territories and nations, capable of significantly influencing the conditions of well-being and quality of life, and of making the Circular City Model (CCM) operational, preserving and enhancing seas and marine resources in a sustainable way. This can be achieved through the construction of appropriate production and consumption models, with attention to relations with the urban and territorial system. This paper presents an adaptive decision-making process for Naples (Italy) commercial port's development strategies, aimed at re-establishing a sustainable city-port relationship and making Circular Economy (CE) principles operative. The approach has aimed at implementing a CCM by operationalizing European recommendations provided within both the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework-specifically focusing on goals 9, 11 and 12-and the Maritime Spatial Planning European Directive 2014/89, to face conflicts about the overlapping areas of the city-port through multidimensional evaluations' principles and tools. In this perspective, a four-step methodological framework has been structured applying a place-based approach with mixed evaluation methods, eliciting soft and hard knowledge domains, which have been expressed and assessed by a core set of Sustainability Indicators (SI), linked to SDGs. The contribution outcomes have been centred on the assessment of three design alternatives for the East Naples port and the development of a hybrid regeneration scenario consistent with CE and sustainability principles. The structured decision-making process has allowed us to test how an adaptive approach can expand the knowledge base underpinning policy design and decisions to achieve better outcomes and cultivate a broad civic and technical engagement, that can enhance the legitimacy and transparency of policies

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Discoverable Free Space Gesture Sets for Walk-Up-and-Use Interactions

abstract: Advances in technology are fueling a movement toward ubiquity for beyond-the-desktop systems. Novel interaction modalities, such as free space or full body gestures are becoming more common, as demonstrated by the rise of systems such as the Microsoft Kinect. However, much of the interaction design research for such systems is still focused on desktop and touch interactions. Current thinking in free-space gestures are limited in capability and imagination and most gesture studies have not attempted to identify gestures appropriate for public walk-up-and-use applications. A walk-up-and-use display must be discoverable, such that first-time users can use the system without any training, flexible, and not fatiguing, especially in the case of longer-term interactions. One mechanism for defining gesture sets for walk-up-and-use interactions is a participatory design method called gesture elicitation. This method has been used to identify several user-generated gesture sets and shown that user-generated sets are preferred by users over those defined by system designers. However, for these studies to be successfully implemented in walk-up-and-use applications, there is a need to understand which components of these gestures are semantically meaningful (i.e. do users distinguish been using their left and right hand, or are those semantically the same thing?). Thus, defining a standardized gesture vocabulary for coding, characterizing, and evaluating gestures is critical. This dissertation presents three gesture elicitation studies for walk-up-and-use displays that employ a novel gesture elicitation methodology, alongside a novel coding scheme for gesture elicitation data that focuses on features most important to users’ mental models. Generalizable design principles, based on the three studies, are then derived and presented (e.g. changes in speed are meaningful for scroll actions in walk up and use displays but not for paging or selection). The major contributions of this work are: (1) an elicitation methodology that aids users in overcoming biases from existing interaction modalities; (2) a better understanding of the gestural features that matter, e.g. that capture the intent of the gestures; and (3) generalizable design principles for walk-up-and-use public displays.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201